A thought experiment
By Bruce Walker
web posted December 16, 2002
I have written several articles since September 11, 2001 on the
subject of why so many people hate America. Why is this
particular pathology so common around the world? And why
does it even infect so many wealthy, powerful Americans?
Envy is a common excuse, but envy is an obviously bogus
reason. Osama bin Ladin was rich, not poor, and it is the rich
nations, not the poor nations, that manifest the greatest visceral
hatred of America. Those who hate America are the same sort
of elitists who thought the pampered Crown Princess of England
was a wonderful role model, and who loath genuine success
stories, like Vice President Cheney, who came from rugged
Rocky Mountains to become Vice President.
Is America hated because it is an "imperialist" nation? If so, then
this must be the oddest complaint among the many odd
complaints about America. Russia, Turkey, Germany, Britain,
France, Japan and China are among the many nations who were
true imperialist nations, and they are not hated like America.
Nations like Denmark, Holland and Portugal have had overseas
empires much larger than any territories possessed by the United
States. Almost every nation and every people have actually been
imperialist powers at one time or another except America.
Even Mexico, the most logical nation to complain of American
"imperialism" can do so only by ignoring history. The Mexican-
American War was as much the product of the Mexican war
party, led by Santa Anna, as it was by a war party in the United
States. Mexico had a "right" to California, Texas, New Mexico
and Arizona only based upon its possession of those lands as
effective colonies.
Texans (or "Texicans") rebelled against an imperial power when
they won independence from Mexico. When the Mexican-
American War began, the Mexican Army was larger and
stronger than the American Army and the war could not have
been won if the people in those lands "lost" to Mexico had not
viewed America, and not Mexico, as the better governor of their
lands.
These people were right - those lucky enough to have been in
Texas or California had much better lives than those in the
adjacent states of Mexico. This is not because Mexico was a
bad imperial power, but because the United States had uniquely
rejected imperialism.
The fledgling nation of the United States possessed huge
territories around the Great Lakes and it could have treated
these as "colonies." Instead, the Articles of Confederation
passed the Northwest Ordinances, laws which required that
those territories be admitted as equal and sovereign states. These
laws were reenacted under the new Constitution. The flow of
American history which led to each territorial possession
becoming a full and equal political partner in the whole seems
undistinguished to us today because it happened with so little
fuss.
If America is not envied and is not resented for its imaginary
"imperialism" then it must be hated for its racism and bigotry,
right? Wrong. Nigerians, Ceylonese, Iraqi, Indonesians,
Ugandans, Sudanese and countless other peoples failed utterly in
solving the problems of internal ethnic, religious and racial
minorities. Even in modern Europe, Spain, Belgium, Yugoslavia,
and Ireland are simmering pots of aggrieved peoples. Have any
two great powers in modern history been as utterly racist as Nazi
Germany or contemporary Japan? Sadly, bigotry exists
everywhere. America has done far more to end bigotry than any
major nation in the world.
Perhaps the best indicator of the true tolerance of America is its
attitude toward that other group of human beings most viscerally
despised: Jews. If there is a nation hated as much as America, it
is surely Israel. If there is a group of people more hated than
Americans, it must be Jews. Why?
Those Zionists who founded the modern state of Israel did not
dream of building a huge empire; they simply wanted a place to
live in peace. Israel could have really "won" the wars in 1956
and 1967 - that is to say, it could have overrun Egypt and Syria
and established a really safe perimeter zone. It chose not to do
so.
America has also consciously chosen not to exploit its military
and economic superiority to create global hegemony. In 1945,
the United States of America had a navy and an air force much
larger than all the other navies and air forces on Earth - and
behind two vast oceans, it could strike at will against any nation
with no possibility of suffering any harm to itself at all.
The American economy produced twice as much as all of the
rest of the world combined. The other two other major powers -
Britain and Russia - were dependent upon America for food, oil,
manufactured goods and much of their military equipment. British
dependence is pretty well known, but the Soviets also required
American transport and warplanes to defeat the Nazis - the
Soviets, by contrast, supplied no weapons or equipment at all to
America.
America also possessed a complete monopoly on fission
weapons and it could have, if it had wished, incinerated
Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk and Kharkov in a single
afternoon. The Soviet Union was vastly weaker than the United
States then, and the other major military forces were either
English-speaking democracies or the gallant Poles, who loathed
the Russians.
But America in 1945 wanted no more than what Israel wanted
after its military victories: genuine peace. But like Israel, the
world will not let America live in peace. What do these two
nations have in common? What separates America and Israel
from the rest of the world? People who transformed these places
traveled at great hardship for the right to live there. Often those
who immigrated to America or to Israel did so with only hope as
their star.
In this respect, America and Israel are what could be called the
world's only two "consensual nations." Political geography is
arbitrary and there is no marketplace of nations, except in the
case of these two extraordinary polities. What do the American
and the Israeli people want? They want simply to be left alone in
peace. That is the very reason these two nations exist.
Persecution is an integral and tragic part of Jewish history.
Persecution was the also the motivation for Catholics and
Quakers and Amish and Puritans and countless other of the
original colonizers of America to found a new nation. What if
there had been no America? What if Israel, as an historical
homeland, did not exist?
What if the only escape for all the persecuted peoples who have
made up America was quite literally to leave this world and
travel to another world? Albert Einstein was famous for his
"thought experiments" and here is a thought experiment for
Americans and Jews: suppose that instead of ocean vessels that
space vessels carried millions of desperate Irish, Poles, Jews,
Italians, Greeks, Russians and the other peoples who forged
America into a great nation from Earth to a tiny colony of
Englishmen on Mars, and that these people took their flight
because only from the safe distance of millions of miles of cold,
dark space could these peoples live as they wished.
Now suppose that space travel was so difficult that almost no
traffic, other than Earth purging itself of these "undesirables" was
possible. And suppose that the Republic of Mars was
transformed by these peoples into a nation that dwarfed in its
prosperity, peacefulness and social mobility the squabbling
nations of Earth. What would be the only concept that could
unite these angry peoples of Earth? Hatred of the Republic of
Mars. Even if America was on Mars, it would be hated.
Bruce Walker is a senior writer with Enter Stage Right. He is
also a frequent contributor to The Pragmatist and The Common
Conservative.
Enter Stage Right -- http://www.enterstageright.com